That is all to say that June was my most prolific reading month in almost two years, and I have talked about very few of those books in this space (sob). So here’s a quick recap of some of my June reading highlights. I’m starting at the end because the book I read over the weekend (yes, yes, that doesn’t count as reading it in June, but I can’t wait until the end of July to tell you about it!) was so good and so warm and so lovely that I want to bring it into your lives as quickly as possible.

Longtime followers of the blog will know of my affection for Anna-Marie McLemore, whose super-queer, super-magical YA novels have a firm place in my heart. I haven’t yet read anything by Tehlor Kay Mejia, but obviously I will need to after falling completely in love with Miss Meteor. Set in a small Arizona town called Meteor, Miss Meteor follows two former best friends, Lita and Chicky, who are trying to get Lita a win in the town’s biggest annual event, the Miss Meteor Pageant. Nobody who looks like Lita–round, dark-haired, Latina–ever wins the pageant; but Lita has a secret. She’s a star, and she’s turning back into stardust, and before she leaves the world entirely, she first wants to have this one thing.

Chicky and Lita were once inseparable, but their secrets drove them apart. Chicky was scared to tell Lita that she might be queer, and Lita was terrified of confessing to being a star, and their friendship couldn’t hold up under the weight of those secrets and the effort of keeping them. Now they’re brought back into each other’s spheres, and they’re trying to find a way back to each other. While both of them have (very! adorable!) love interests, the heart of the book is about their friendship, and I burst into tears at the end when Chicky’s finally able to be open with Lita.

Miss Meteor reminded me of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, a book I have not shut about since reading it for the first time ten thousand years ago, in 2019. Both of them deal with heavy topics — Chicky and Lita, and others in their sphere, face racist, sexist, and queerphobic bullying from their classmates — and both of them are ultimately such warm, dear, loving books about the power of friendship. Not only do Chicky and Lita come back to each other, a thing I was tearfully rooting for the whole time, but they also construct a web of support for themselves and each other, finding ways to trust and depend on jock hotshot (and trans boy) Cole and sensitive artist Junior, as well as Chicky’s three gorgeous and ferocious sisters. Y’ALL KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT SISTERS.

Read this book, friends, if you want to feel like the world is not trash. It brightened my day, my week, my month, my life.

What word are we using for books like Daisy Jones and the Six and The Final Revival of Opal and Nev? Where it’s not exactly epistolary (because there are no letters!) and it’s not exactly found documents (because it’s not really documents either, and they are also deliberately compiled by a fictional character within the world of the book), so what would we call it? The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is an oral history of a controversial rock pairing, the white British Nev and the Black American Opal, which produced an incredible album but fell apart in the aftermath of a major racist trauma at one of their events. The book is interviews compiled by journalist Sunny Curtis, the daughter of a drummer for Opal and Nev who had an affair with Opal and died before the narrator was born.

While I enjoyed Daisy Jones and the Six, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev worked even better for me. The books are superficially similar, in that each is an oral history of a fictional rock group, each compiled by a journalist with a personal connection to the story. But whereas I feel pretty distant from the World of Music (and therefore felt like I was missing a lot of what Taylor Jenkins Reid had to say about–I want to say Stevie Nicks?), Dawnie Walton manages to produce a book about music that’s about so much more than music. It’s about the industry, for sure, but mainly it’s about the way the music industry, like so many industries in America, chews up and spits out Black artists, eager for their talent but fully uninterested in their personhood.

I admit that I am–with this book and as always!–desperately allured by a book that refuses to answer one of its central questions. In this case, the question is about the level of Nev’s guilt. Is he culpable, or is he merely complicit — and does it matter? The Final Revival of Opal and Nev leaves the question open. Not only do we not know if Nev did the thing a single, untrustworthy person claims he did, we don’t even know if Opal, having been told of the claim, believes that he did it. Instead of giving us a pat answer to that question, Walton leaves it open, focusing instead on what the question means to that relationship. In the end, Nev’s specific actions matter so much less than his positionality within the industry and what he’s willing to do when push comes to shove.

Please accept major content warnings for racist violence! A key event of the book hinges on an evening in which white supremacist musicians and their fans do a horrific crime, inspired in part by the Altamont Free Concert in 1969.

I also really recommend this Shondaland interview with the author, because it’s a fascinating (and spoiler-free!) glimpse at how she got the idea for this book and how her career as a journalist influenced its structure.

Though I’m not going to talk about Fugitive Telemetry here because my comments about it would just be a recurrence of all previous shriekings about Murderbot (Murderbottttt!), I do want to mention that I adore this subgenre where it’s SF or fantasy but mainly it’s a murder mystery. Books in this subgenre I’ve enjoyed this year include A Master of Djinn (podcast interview with the author coming soon!), Fugitive Telemetry, and The Conductors. More please!

The Conductors centers on married couple Hetty and Benjy (but it’s not romantic between them, they are good friends) (no, lol, it of course proves to be romantic between them), who spent the Civil War years helping enslaved people escape from slavery to the North, making use of folk magic to bolster their work. Now the war is over, and Hetty and Benjy have settled in Philadelphia, where they are making a life together in a community of free Black folks. Hetty doesn’t feel quite as connected to her community as she once did, but that doesn’t mean she’s unaffected when an old friend of hers, Charlie, turns up dead in an alley, with a death sigil carved into his skin.

The decision to set Hetty’s story after the war is one that I love. While Glover dips into flashback to share glimpses of the work Hetty and Benjy did as conductors on the Underground Railroad, and how they built the community in which they now reside, she’s mainly interested in what the world looks like now. The people in Hetty’s community were of course scarred by their time in slavery, but Glover is less interested in trauma and more in what community among survivors looks like. To unravel the mystery of Charlie’s death, Hetty has to involve herself deeply in the lives of her friends, from whom she’s become a little distant. So as she’s working to solve this murder, she’s also re-discovering the people she loves, why she loved them, and how much she can depend on them to be in her corner. It’s a lovely emotional arc, particularly in a book whose setting and premise is so closely entwined with America’s history of slavery and trauma.

More in this universe, please! I’d love to see Hetty and Benjy solve more crimes, using their skills in magic and blacksmithing and dressmaking!

What did y’all read in June? Anything that you can’t stop pushing on your friends and loved ones?

The post June Recap! appeared first on Reading the End.

2019 JENNY IS FUN.

Now that literally everyone but me has done their best of 2018 post, I thought I’d enter the game. You have ceased to care but I CANNOT BE STOPPED. We’re breaking this business down by categories, so let’s get into it. First up: YA!

I read a ton this year, but somehow I don’t feel like I got in as much YA reading as I wanted! Luckily there were some standouts. The Summer of Jordi Perez is a doll of an f/f contemporary romcom, with a fat aspiring fashion designer MC, and plenty of emotional negotiation. It felt like reading an injection of sunshine. Seafire, by Natalie Parker, is the perfect ladies seafaring adventure that I needed to round out my year of reading. If you enjoyed Sarah Tolcser’s excellent Song of the Current series (I did!), Seafire is a good readalike. The girls in it are fierce, and their friendships are the book’s center. It’s also got marvelous worldbuilding. Hugely recommend. (Thanks to Charlotte for the rec!)

I have raved in this space a bunch already about Anna-Marie McLemore, but brace yourself for a bit more raving about her latest, Blanca and Roja. It’s about two sisters in a family that always has two girls; and when the younger one reaches a certain age that I cannot currently remember, one of the two girls is transformed into a swan. Blanca and Roja deconstructs the good-sister-evil-sister trope in ways that are consistently unexpected and lovely. The consistency with which McLemore produces these beautifully written queer Latina fairy tales blows me away. She’s one of those authors who makes me feel lucky to be a reader. (If you liked Sarah McCarry’s books, McLemore is similarly dreamy and gorgeous.)

(Hey, when is Sarah McCarry going to write another book?)

I’ve noticed that the less literary fiction I read, the fewer authors I read from other countries. I’m hoping to change this in 2019! I’d like to read more genre fiction by authors from other countries, even though I recognize that less of it gets published in America even than the heavily-American literary fiction genre. Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, came to me via the Tournament of Books, which I was half-assedly trying to participate in by real-quick reading a short entrant before bed. I do not recommend this strategy. Fever Dream is incredibly scary — one of those horror books where you are deeply uneasy from the get-go, and the feeling of unease persists long after the book is over.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi a little, in the dreaminess of the writing and the perpetual uncertainty about what’s real. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a Nigerian child who has more than one self inside her. I am not sure how else to describe this book. Trigger warning for rape. The writing is unbelievably gorgeous, the book is deeply strange, I loved it.

Occasionally someone will come to me asking for a book rec where the writing, the characters, and the plot are all superb. This is a very hard rec request to fulfill, and I pretty much just always shove Fingersmith at them. But now I have another book that meets these requirements, and it is Esi Edugyan’s wonderful historical novel, Washington Black. Though the first bit of the story is hard to read (it’s set on a plantation in Barbados in the early 1800s), it’s absolutely worth pushing through. Washington Black is a slave who gets taken on as a sort of apprentice and assistant to the plantation owner’s brother, a scientist and abolitionist who is working less on abolishing slavery than he is trying to build an airship. I was absolutely blown away by this book: It explores so many themes and ideas and histories without ever feeling overstuffed, and I wrote down approximately ten million quotes from it because of how insightful and interesting the writing is.

My most-recommended book of the year — although partly because I didn’t read Washington Black until December — is Tara Westover’s Educated. Recommended to me by the wonderful For Real podcast, it’s a memoir about a girl who grew up in a extreme survivalist Mormon family that didn’t get her a birth certificate or send her to school. I can’t overstate how bonkers this book is, and I 90% recommended it to people to ensure that I wouldn’t have to be alone with all the shit that went down in this woman’s life. It’s about the ways abuse can sit beside love in a family, and Westover does not downplay her ongoing trauma.

My other two best-of-nonfiction picks are about gender and race and how they function in our lives. Ijeoma Iluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a terrific primer on some of the most common questions and ideas that come up in conversations about race in America. She’s typically sharp and critical, exploring the many, many ways racism continues to shape American life in systemic ways. (If you haven’t yet read her interview with Rachel Dolezal, you should do so now.) Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an quite-academic book about sexism that’s worth plowing through if you can. I screamed YES so many times while reading it.

The wonderful Bridget put me onto Jade City with her relentless advocacy of it, and I am not sorry she did. It’s kind of a mafia/martial arts/magic story set in an alternate universe where jade gives you magical strength and a group of powerful families controls the country in a delicate balance. Fonda Lee’s worldbuilding is superb, down to gestures and phrases that make her world feel textured and real. I loved it and I can’t wait for the sequel. The Descent of Monsters, by JY Yang, is actually the third in its novella series, but my favorite in the series so far. It’s written partly as a bureaucratic report, which is — of course — the way to my heart. I’ve loved watching Yang grow as a writer over the course of the Tensorate series, and I remain perpetually in delight to see what they do next.

SL Huang’s Zero Sum Game rivals Seafire for making me just feel happy while reading it. It’s just a damn good adventure that reminds you why you like reading. Cas Russell is a math genius and minor criminal who gets sucked into a corporate conspiracy that goes far beyond anything she could have imagined. Grudging respect is built. Math is used to do fights. It fucking rules. (Sequel to follow in 2019 – yay!)

And that’s it for 2018! Did you read any of these? What were some of your favorites for the year? Are you going to read Washington Black or do I need to pester you about it some more?

The post The Best of 2018 appeared first on Reading the End.

What I’m saying is that I read a lot of books in January. Some were YA.² Here’s a round-up of those.

Beasts Made of Night, Tochi Onyebuchi

An excellent cover for an excellent book! Beasts Made of Night takes us to the city of Kos, where mages can call forth the spirits of sins from the sinners. Aki like Taj come forward to eat the sin-beasts that result, though eating sins marks their skin with tattoos and eventually drives them mad. I loved this fictional Nigerian city and the scrappy street kids that occupied it, and Onyebuchi drops plenty of hints about the magic the wider world contains. I’ll very much look forward to the sequel.

Burn Baby Burn, Meg Medina

I’ve been meaning to read a book by Meg Medina for untold ages, and at last I have done so! Burn Baby Burn takes place in Brooklyn in 1977, when the city is terrorized by the Son of Sam and our protagonist, Nora, is terrorized by the increasing violence and unpredictability of her older brother. Medina evokes the heat and danger of this time in New York, and I was glad to see a depiction of a type of family violence that rarely comes up in fiction.

Everless, Sara Holland

I loved the premise of Everless but thought it lost something in the execution. In Jules Ember’s world, time is literally money: Days and months and years are extracted from the poor and, by and large, given to the rich. When she goes to work at the Everless estate, Jules expects to gain some time to put away and maybe to solve the secrets her father has always kept from her. Holland maybe has a few too many balls in the air in her debut novel, such that the plot twist towards the end feels more confusing than shocking.

Wild Beauty, Anna-Marie McLemore

And Anna-Marie McLemore continues to make me revisit my dislike of magic realism. Wild Beauty is the story of the Nomeolvides women, five in each generation, who tend the grounds at La Pradera and whose love is a curse. When the Nomeolvides girls admit to each other that they have all fallen in love with the wealthy Bay Briar, they make sacrifices to La Pradera to keep it from taking her from them. The next day, a boy called Fel appears in their garden, with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

McLemore’s writing is as lush and dreamy as it was in When the Moon Was Ours, and she continues to write queer romance stories (and straight ones) that make my heart sing with their respectfulness and loveliness. She’s quickly become a must-read author for me.

Here We Are Now, Jasmine Warga

This was recommended by one of the authors in my December YA Agenda column, and I was delighted to check it out and discover this new author. Tal has long suspected that famous musician Julian Oliver is her father (the father her mother won’t talk about), but that doesn’t mean she’s prepared for him to show up at her door. She goes with him to see her grandfather in hospital before he dies, and in the process she and Julian learn about each other and themselves.

As always with secret-baby stories, Here We Are Now doesn’t quite manage to get me to buy Tal’s mother’s reasons for concealing her existence from Julian. She still just seemed like an immoral jerk. Apart from that, though, Warga gets at a lot of real truths about emotions, family, friendship, and the human experience. It was also terrific to see a protagonist who’s culturally Muslim but (mostly) doesn’t practice.

Turtles All the Way Down, John Green

Actually I finished this in February, but close enough. In the five years since John Green has published a book, I had a lot of time to get annoyed with the narrative of John Green, Savior of Young Adult Fiction, but no new John Green books to read. Turns out, he’s a pretty good writer. I sort of forgot! Turtles All the Way Down features a treasure of a best friend character, plenty of snappy dialogue, a heartbreaking depiction of OCD, and an actually genuinely good and effective therapist. Good stuff!

So that’s my January in YA! Did you read any good YA this past month? Anything I shouldn’t miss?

The post January YA Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Just absolutely everything about Miel and Sam’s relationship made me happy. I love it that McLemore lets them have sex YOU KNOW AS TEENS DO SOMETIMES and they aren’t punished for it. I love it that even though they are clearly devoted to each other throughout the book, they also mess things up with each other and have to apologize and figure things out with each other afterward. I love that they’re desperately attracted to each other (yay for depicting passion in queer relationships!) and sometimes that’s good and easy, and sometimes it makes already-complicated issues more complicated.

The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.

And I love that they get a happy ending. Queer kids deserve happy endings.

What else, let’s see. Oh, I loved it that the antagonists of the book, four nearly identical white sisters who have ruled the town all their lives and are trying to keep that situation going, are still clearly the protagonists of their own stories. I got anxious around the midpoint that the Bonner girls were being set up as Bad Femininity to contrast against Miel’s Good Femininity, which is a trope I could not be more tired of, but the climax of the book reclaims enough interiority for all the Bonners to satisfy my greedy heart.

It’s interesting — When the Moon Was Ours is not, as I’ve said, my type of book. I prefer a book that bothers less about lush prose and more about thrilling adventures and robot pals perhaps; less magic realism and more straight-ahead magic with really specific rules and nefarious power struggles perhaps. But I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to have a book like this in my hands and know that it’s available to teenagers, to let them know a little bit more about the possibilities the world offers.

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